This segues nicely with a company I’ve written previously about - YipTV.. A company which can do to TV what Vonage did to telephone service. In a nutshell, for $15 per month you get access to Latin American and European content which could cost you over $100 if you were to get similar service from the cable company. It isn't quite apples to apples yet as cable companies may have a more extensive line-up of channels. Having said that, at 15% of the cost, it’s a smart way to get a taste of the international content you want but on a budget.

Now, the deal is even more of a no-brainer to try as you can get access to 17 out of its 70 channels for free for an unlimited period of time. YipTV’s free channels are comprised of leading entertainment, sports, family, music and news.

In addition, new subscribers can get access to seven premium channels free for one week.

I’ve used the service on an iPhone streaming to an HDTV via Apple TV. It looks and works great. The interface can be more intuitive – but you get used to it after a few minutes.

Here are the available channels:

Channel

Country of origin

Free Channels include

NTN 24

Colombia

Canal Surg

Latin America

Caribvision

Caribbean

Clubbing TV

Paris, France

Mi Musica HD

Latin America, Ecudaor

One America News

USA

Enlance Juvenil

USA

HitN

USA

JCTV

USA

Smile of a child

USA

TBN

USA

TBN Enlance

USA

The Church Channel

USA

Trendy

Colombia

Yes

Columbia

RT Spanish

Russia

RT English

Russia

Premium Channels free for seven days include

Antena 3

Spain

Hola TV

Spain

Canal 52 MX

Spain

TYC Sports

Argentina

PX TV

Mexico

TV Quisqueya

Dominican Republic

Mi Gente

Central America, Columbia

beIN SPORTS

Global, USA

beIN SPORTS é

Global, USA

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Expect Cloud UC Player BroadVoice to Acquire and More Inside Scooptag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.530502015-07-27T21:18:40Z2015-07-27T21:30:54ZRich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/BroadVoice begins to construct new headquartersBroadVoice has been having a great deal of success lately – they’re moving to a new HQ, ranking at 316 on the fastest growing U.S. company list by Deloite and adding new features to their hosted communications platform. To find out more I had a chance to interview company CEO Jim Murphy – I hope you find it useful.

I’ve been seeing the BroadVoice name more than ever – what’s changed to make this possible?

Our Cloud PBX product has been really gaining traction over the last 12 months. The noise is coming less from us, and more from Master Agents, VAR partners, and customers who have become our advocates. It’s very exciting.

You’re a tech veteran, how has your career led you this point?

I do feel I’ve taken a real telecom path, starting with pagers in the early 90’s, then cell phones, dial-up internet, broadband internet, then VoIP. Each one of those began as a start-up, clawing our way up. I’ve been very fortunate to build a good team over that time. Some have been with us over 17 years. With the recent acquisition of IKANO Communications, we were reunited with some of our original team members from the beginning.

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve overcome to make your company a success?

I think the biggest challenge for any business is to have all the parts humming at once. I felt we had a really good hosted voice product for business a couple years ago. But we lacked the sales team and marketing engine to really execute our growth goals with that product. The first few Channel Managers we hired really bought into our vision of the company, and we quickly built an amazing channel program. Then it was just overcoming a brand awareness issue. It took some time to hit that critical mass where people are talking about your product. Now instead of us chasing new Agents and VAR Partners, they are approaching us.

What are the biggest competitive concerns?

The hosted voice space is evolving at a pace I’ve never seen. Customers are embracing complex technologies like Presence Awareness and Unified Communications, without the lengthy education cycle on what it does for their business and why they need it. That being said, we know our competitors are trying to get in front of our customers with their own offering. It’s why building and nurturing that customer relationship is the most important aspect of retaining them.

Do net neutrality or mobile adoption issues worry your company at all?

Personally, I believe Net Neutrality is of paramount importance to the internet and to our freedom of choice. But our Business division doesn’t worry as much about it, since we’re often bringing in our own data circuit with the voice. And our products are extending further and further into the mobile space. The traditional office desk phone is being supplanted by softphones and smartphone apps. Work is getting done from tablets on the road. We’ve seen it coming and have moved to embrace it.

Do you see adding other cloud services as a natural company extension?

Our recently launched Unified Communications product extended us into the corporate email and chat services realm, both of which are delivered as cloud services. Archiving and Compliance for those services seem like a natural progression. We have had some customers ask us if we would offer cloud backup, simply to have most of their cloud services with one provider. The jury is still out on that however.

What’s left to accomplish?

We set some lofty revenue goals a couple years ago, in the nine figures. We’re halfway there. To get the rest of the way, we’ll need to continue to accelerate our organic growth, plus I think we have a couple more acquisitions left to do in this space.

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IoT News: Smart Transportation, Smart Cities and Holograms you Touchtag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.530122015-07-02T20:42:25Z2015-07-02T20:51:06ZSmart transportation is on fire - it will be an almost $200 billion dollar by 2021 - and it is starting from a very small number today. This is massive growth - wow! I don't know about you but I...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
Smart transportation is on fire - it will be an almost $200 billion dollar by 2021 - and it is starting from a very small number today. This is massive growth - wow! I don't know about you but I can't wait for the day when my car helps me find an open parking spot - and perhaps even sort spots by cost or proximity depending on weather.

From there - we go to smart cities - which of course makes sense because the cars need to speak with something besides themselves. Finally, Arduino has a new platform for IoT - wearable tech, robotics and a lot more.

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IoT News from Cisco, University of Missouri and a new IoT Certification Availabletag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.530102015-07-01T19:39:49Z2015-07-01T19:51:05ZLots of exciting news in the IoT and M2M spaces today. Cisco unveils six pillars for IoT development and lots of new products, iControl Networks will make the smart-home a reality. There is a big IoT project going on to...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/

Lots of exciting news in the IoT and M2M spaces today. Cisco unveils six pillars for IoT development and lots of new products, iControl Networks will make the smart-home a reality. There is a big IoT project going on to assist the elderly at the University of Missouri and finally a great new IoT certification program worth checking out this summer at IoT Evolution Expo in Las Vegas.

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IoT News: Lake George, IBM, Sears, Gemalto, China Growth and Moretag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.530052015-06-30T22:25:45Z2015-06-30T22:31:22ZMassive growth in M2M activity in Asia, Gemalto in Brazil, Sears offering connected solutions flagship store and more are part of the day's IoT news. I almost forgot - there is a huge project at Lake George, New York which...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
IoT news. I almost forgot - there is a huge project at Lake George, New York which will monitor the lake thanks to IBM and others. Very cool.

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45+ Webinar Best Practice Tipstag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529932015-06-25T20:36:13Z2015-06-25T20:47:46ZA very comprehensive and helpful guest post by Pierre Kerbage, Senior Vice President at Ironton Global on how you can become a great presenter: Ever hosted a webinar, or passed on a meeting to a fellow employee, only to be...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
A very comprehensive and helpful guest post by Pierre Kerbage, Senior Vice President at Ironton Global on how you can become a great presenter:

Ever hosted a webinar, or passed on a meeting to a fellow employee, only to be embarrassed by the outcome?

It is said that we learn more from our failures than from our successes. As a person who has been doing webinars, ever since the word (and the technology has existed), here is what I have learned. Also, I will sum things up by saying the law P for Pierre: Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. BE PREPARED:

A day prior to your webinar:

TEST the webinar service you are about to use with your current browser. Have at least an alternative browser ready in case changes occur. Does the AUDIO portion of the conference work? Does sharing your screen work? It is preferred to use a HEADSET. Use a quality headset – there IS a difference. Practice with a fellow and ask them how you sound. Kill all noisy items in your room. Fans are louder than you think – don’t go presenting from a server room. If you don’t want to take chances, USE A LAND LINE! And don’t EVER use a speakerphone.

PRACTICE the mechanics of the Webinar tool you are using. Avoid saying, this is the first time I use this service, or they have changed the software – you WILL lose credibility. BE PREPARED. Know the routines

PRACTICE your webinar INSIDE AND OUT – know it almost BY HEART!!!!

Test your PPT presentation and/or EVERYTHING you are going to show. Have these shortcuts ALL available from a single folder or from your DESKTOP and in an area you can immediately go to. Fumbling loses audience. Also, nothing worse than spelling or grammatical mistakes in a presentation. Don’t just rely on spell check. Read it and Fix it. You will be surprised what you find. And just because another marketing person did that already DOES NOT mean it is perfect.

A day prior to the webinar. Refrain from doing PATCHES, install new software or make drastic changes to your PC

Do you use a cordless mouse or keyboard? Ever had them DIE in the middle of a presentation? I have. CHARGE any wireless device 1 day prior to the webinar

When you send meeting invites, be sure to specify the TIME ZONES – many people are confused. Don’t just say 1:00PM but rather state 11AM Pacific Time, 2:00PM Central or 3PM Eastern. You can leave off the Daylight and Savings – no one cares.

If you are going to use a Video Cam – BE AWARE of what’s behind you.

Be prepared to RECORD your Webinar so you can publish it

If you are going to use your laptop, be sure it is PLUGGED IN and it is CHARGED. Don’t rely on a battery.

If you can be on a SEPARATE network/bandwidth, that is the best way to make sure other people in the office’s download don’t affect your presentation

Know that despite ALL your preparations – things can and will go wrong. DO you have another laptop immediately available? DO.

2 Hours prior to your webinar:

SHUT DOWN any antivirus running services – nothing more annoying than the service starting to scan your PC while you are in the middle of a Webinar

Restart your PC. That way you are starting without a minimum set of running services of programs

Clear your Browser’s history before the Webinar – and QUIT browsing. Your audience does need to know where you have been browsing (let’s just leave it at that)

When you right click on Word or Excel or PPT – it will show ALL the places you have been. Unpin anything from the list you don’t need to show publically and PIN to the list what you will be showing AND ONLY what you will be showing

Adjust your heat or AC so it is at the ideal for you and you are comfortable during the presentation

Have a BOTTLED WATER close to you. Especially if you are going to talk for a while. Keep the lid CLOSED until you need to drink. DO NOT have a glass of water or ANY open container. You WILL end up spilling it on your keyboard or yourself during the presentation. Use a capped bottled water and a straw. Put the cap back ON the bottled water when done.

Advise everyone in the office that you will be doing a webinar and to keep the noise level at a minimum. The public does not need to hear background conversations.

Shut down any backup procedure that may accidentally kick in while you are presenting

Shut down ANYTHING (a scheduled job) that may kick in while you are presenting

PRINT YOUR SLIDES to a printer – that way if something is to go wrong with the Video option, YOU CAN CONTINUE to talk at least.

Don’t be too wordy. Don’t write novels. STICK TO KEY BULLET POINTS

30 minutes prior to your webinar:

Whether you think you need to or not – USE THE BATHROOM. Nothing worse than the urge to go in a 2 hour long webinar.

If you present from your house / home office, be sure that your windows are down and your door is closed. How many times have we heard lawn mowers or the dog in the background? Get the doggy out or in a place where they will NOT be distracting to you. Refrain from scheduling your lawn people at the same time as your conference

You WILL be using BANDWIDTH when you present. Shutdown your

Wireless cameras

Any device on your LAN that is NOT NECESSARY

Stop UPLOADING and DOWNLOADING stuff – this will affect your bandwidth and your presentation and if you are using a MIC, your audio. If you are in an office, advise others.

And MOST importantly – SHUT DOWN YOUR EMAIL – and EVERYTHING ELSE. Don’t forget to CLEAR your browser’s history AGAIN. Be sure that when you launch your browser that it has not cached previous pages. Be sure you ONLY have the material you are going to present open AND NOTHING ELSE. NO DISTRACTIONS!

Turn OFF your cell phone and ALL other phones. By off – I mean OFF not just on mute. You don’t want your phone’s update routine to KICK IN in the middle of your presentation and eating up all your bandwidth. Same with your tablet or ANY OTHER PC you can keep off.

NO DISTRACTIONS!!!!!

15 minutes prior to your webinar:

LOG IN! Be there. You can play a backward timer on your PC – there many free or inexpensive routines that will display a backward timer.

START ON TIME. Don’t say we are waiting for a few more to show up. Not fair to those who did show up on time. Be precise. Start at EXACTLY the time.

MUTE YOUR AUDIENCE. If you do not, someone invariably places you on hold and we get to hear their Music On Hold add. Then you are trying to find out who it is. Extremely disruptive.

During the webinar:

Start by THANKING your audience for attending

Introduce yourself, give your contact info – introduce everyone else that will be assisting you if applicable, alongside with their title, all contact info and their territory if applicable. This way your audience knows who their point of contact is/will be.

Start by showing AN AGENDA. It should have the TIME you will be covering each topic and the person that will be presenting. Try to stick to the time (if possible) and the agenda. Nothing worse than a speaker getting off for minutes on a tangent. You still have to answer the questions, but bring the presentation back on track quickly

If you are not a great speaker – you are NOT to present. It is not just the matter – it is the MANNER that counts. Enunciate correctly. Don’t use slang.

Be polite, considerate, kind.

You WILL be asked difficult questions. Pause, think, act. NEVER react. If you do not know the answer, that’s ok – let them know that you will find out and will get back with them AND DO! Don’t make stuff up just to seem knowledgeable. Others may call you in on it

Be HUMBLE yet CONFIDENT. You are here to EDUCATE not to show off what you know. Come across as a person willing to share information and a win-win attitude.

Never mispronounce, use bad grammar or anything but perfect English!

Stay away from jokes, political insinuation, political events that just happened or anything not 100% purely business – small talks are ok for 10 seconds but GET BACK ON TRACK! I was one time nearly booted out of a webinar for calling International FIFA Football SOCCER as most of my audience was not from the U.S. at that time. So even sports can have challenging situations. You are here to present. Not entertain. Be positive, pleasant, humble, kind but also on track!

Interact with your audience if you can.

Have a notepad ready to write down notes. Some speakers know how to split their screens and write down in a hidden area – but then forget that they are ALSO SHARING THAT! Did you just write down something embarrassing?

Don’t put your audience on hold – no one needs to hear your Music On Hold.

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Amazon is Doomed, Apple to hit a Trillion Dollarstag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529922015-06-25T17:17:15Z2015-06-25T17:22:00ZThis is an eye-opening presentation from Steve Galloway of NYU Stern about the future of tech. Facebook and Apple are golden and Amazon will have issue thanks to increasing shipping costs.Macy's is the future of commerce - omnichannel.Its funny -...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/Macy's is the future of commerce - omnichannel.

Its funny - hopefully not offensive to you. Well-done.

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Comcast Business Seeing Nice Broadband Growthtag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529622015-06-08T18:31:23Z2015-06-08T20:31:26ZWhile much of the talk about Comcast in the media recently has involved their M&A aspirations as well as their consumer brand, the real story at the company is Comcast Business. Recently I met with Mike Tighe, Executive Director of...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/While much of the talk about Comcast in the media recently has involved their M&A aspirations as well as their consumer brand, the real story at the company is Comcast Business. Recently I met with Mike Tighe, Executive Director of Data Services of the company who told me the business-focused area of the organization is growing at 21% a year and is taking share.

He went on to say the company has the best footprint in fiber optics – this is important as he sees customer bandwidth needs increasing 30% a year. Moreover, and this is interesting for those who are concerned about the sheer size of the company, they are an insurgent, not an incumbent in competing with DSL.

The pricing is also very attractive - $200/month for a 150 Mbps business broadband connection. Moreover, the company promises you $150 if they can't offer you faster speed or bigger savings on your Internet connection.

One last point – Comcast isn’t losing business to wireless carriers – instead, they see only the cloud telephony companies taking some of their business. This can be determined from where customers port their numbers to. Basically, the news that businesses are eschewing wired for wireless connections seems incorrect - at least for Comcast customers.

The good news for the cable giant is – even if the Time Warner acquisition was denied by regulators – at least there is a very nice growth engine on the business side of the house. And even better, Mike further explained - for the moment, Google and Verizon don’t seem to be focusing on the business market.

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SDN and Micro-Segmentation boost Security for BYOD According to AirWatch/VMwaretag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529612015-06-08T16:09:10Z2015-06-08T16:41:30ZThe proliferation of mobile devices and cloud services has caused a geometric increase in security threat possibilities as each device type and OS version can potentially be vulnerable. In addition, these devices need access to more and more cloud information...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
The proliferation of mobile devices and cloud services has caused a geometric increase in security threat possibilities as each device type and OS version can potentially be vulnerable. In addition, these devices need access to more and more cloud information – which means even more opportunities for attackers to hitch a ride along a VPN tunnel and then move laterally in the data center in the search for information to harvest or other damage to cause.

Some people questioned the acquisition of AirWatch by VMware as BYOD and MDM live in a space far removed from virtualization. The benefits of the deal however are beginning to come to fruition as the company has shown its grand vision of allowing mobile devices access to specific information in the corporate data center. In fact, Mike Maxey, Director of Content Solutions at VMware recently discussed with me how VMware NSX, when deployed with AirWatch EMM or VMware Horizon, addresses the enterprise security challenge of over-provisioned data center access through the use of network micro-segmentation. This model, he explained can prevent users from accessing or even seeing resources that exist within the data center to which they are not entitled.

The VMware NSX approach to securing user access offers several advantages over traditional security approaches—automated provisioning, automated move/add/change for workloads, distributed policy enforcement at every virtual interface and in-kernel, scale-out firewalling distributed to every hypervisor or virtual desktop and baked into the platform.

Deploying VMware NSX with AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management – combining AirWatch identity management and per-app VPN controls with VMware NSX network virtualization completes the security bridge from the device to the data center. This solution allows IT to assign exact data center resources to specific applications based on the organizational groups already set up through AirWatch EMM. The permissions set by IT can prevent the enterprise from overexposing data center information to applications on any device while still empowering the mobile user with the corporate resources they need to do work efficiently and effectively. The combined solution also gives administrators greater visibility into what mobile users can access and eases change management as new applications come online.

Deploying VMware NSX with Horizon enables effective firewalling for each virtual desktop at a VM level, preventing the spread of threats from desktop to server as well as desktop to desktop. Security policies can be created based on individual users or logical groupings, rather than being tied to network topologies, and VMware NSX streamlines and simplifies configuration of security policies based on types of users such as engineering and types of data being accessed payroll.

The company believes that since mobile and virtual desktop sessions are more dynamic than server workloads, static security policies are far less effective. This is why their goal is to provide VMware NSX to simplify and automate the application of network and security policies to users or virtual desktop pools.

Mike went on to explain that AirWatch understands the device, knows its role in the company and using encryption with rights management can ensure information is kept secure. In addition, he explained the system knows when a mobile device is on a 3G connection and can subsequently prohibit large file transfers on such a network as a result. He continued by saying the company has partnerships with other cloud vendors and as I’ve written about before, can ensure encrypted documents do not leave the container – for example, in a situation where a board of directors is getting financial information the company wants to ensure is not shared beyond the board.

Finally, he explained the company has built a set of standards enabling developers to embed security and simultaneously work with the AirWatch console. Salesforce, Xilinx and Box are a few of the companies as part of this initiative he continued.

When you realize the number of attack vectors a malicious user can take such as spear phishing through a social network, locking down everything and coordinating access rights with specific data types makes a great deal of sense.

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InfoVista and Ipanema Technologies Poised to Enable New Carrier Servicestag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529412015-05-27T20:02:39Z2015-05-27T20:23:07ZRich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
The WAN optimization market is expected to more than double in size from 2014 to 2019 eventually hitting $12.1 billion according to MarketsandMarkets. It’s no wonder - Cyril Doussau de Bazignan explained to me in a recent meeting that as more companies adopt SaaS, they have the challenge of ensuring critical applications have adequate performance at the expense of applications which are secondary in importance.

Cyril works at InfoVista, a leading provider of IP and RF planning, assurance and optimization software solutions and they recently acquired WAN optimization and application performance leader Ipanema Technologies. He went on to say CIOs have to deal with the challenges of a multitude of applications running on their network while at the same time, enterprises are looking to offload more traffic to the internet to save money. As a result, this puts more pressure on communications service providers or CSPs.

The numbers are somewhat sobering actually. According to the company:

Companies use 22x more SaaS applications than 2013

48% of CIOs say they have far more applications than the business requires – this is an increase from 34% in 2013

His company helps carriers and the enterprise with application visibility and control. By prioritizing traffic, they can ensure the performance of the most critical apps in their organization. In addition, dynamic WAN selection allows the solution to choose the best path based on the criticality of the application. This is all managed in a fully-automated fashion via their SALSA multi-tenant central management platform.

These features are available he said in a private cloud or a data center and consumers of the applications or corporate workers can be at home or anywhere else when taking advantage of these features. In fact he said, this can be part of a new offering for CSPs – performance as a service which of course is powered by the Ipanema Technologies’ SD WAN.

In order to configure the service, the administrator assigns objectives for various applications such as top, high, medium or low – where top is as close to real-time as possible. In addition, CSPs can take advantage of DPI and optimize data delivery as needed.

In fact the synergies between InfoVista and Ipanema are significant, allowing carriers to benefit from IP and RF planning as well as application optimization and delivery. The company likes to say they orchestrate application and network performance to guarantee business application experience in a digitized world through carrier-grade solutions.

Bottom line – CSPs are in a great position to provide application-aware network services and InfoVista/Ipanema solutions allow carriers to enhance their product and service offerings by providing MPLS-like services for a variety of applications. Moreover, these solutions can be VNFs allowing carriers to integrate them into their forward-looking SDN/NFV network transformations – or software telcos.

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Schneider Electric: More Software and the IoT to Reshape Data Center Designtag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529392015-05-27T15:52:32Z2015-05-27T16:09:26ZRich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
There is a macro trend of moving proprietary hardware systems to open systems and moving hardware to software – at this point, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who tracked my GENBAND Perspectives 15 blog post or last week’s HP NFV story or even the writing I’ve done on Imagine Communications disrupting the video distribution space with SDN and virtualized solutions.

To learn more, I sat down with Schneider Electric’s Srdan Mutabdzija (above), Global Solution Offer Manager, and Jason Covitz (below), Director of Strategy for IT Business where we talked about IT infrastructure and how it will look in the future.

Jason emphasized the move to commoditized and standardized infrastructure – not just in the spaces mentioned above but oil and gas, mining and manufacturing. Srdan explained the evolution of their products and the market in general is to a more prefabricated, plug-and-play, efficient cooling solutions which lower time to market, reduce risk and allow a more seamless move to public/private clouds.

An example of their product offering is the FlexPod Express for the office environment – allowing the company’s data center product to be deployed in an SMB or branch office. The solution supports products from Microsoft, NetApp and Cisco among others.

I also had a chance to read a white paper on the costs associated with a TCO analysis of a traditional data center vs. a scalable, prefabricated data center. The premise is standardized, scalable, pre-assembled, and integrated data center facility power and cooling modules provide a TCO savings of 30% compared to traditional, built-out data center power and cooling infrastructure. Avoiding overbuilt capacity and scaling the design over time contributes to a significant percentage of the overall savings. The results are based on a hypothetical data center in St. Louis, MO in the USA with density of 7kW/rack

You can see below the OPEX and CAPEX costs decrease considerably since the data center can be built out over time. Moreover, Significant CAPEX and OPEX savings accrue when the data center is built out to 4 MW instead of 5 MW. Moreover, running the system at a higher percent load each year results in energy savings and the capital costs savings is approximately 2% due to the cost of capital. One assumes this becomes a greater savings in a higher interest rate environment.

The chart below shows the savings all together over time.

Another important takeaway from my conversation is the edge isn’t going away – especially in light of the fact IoT devices will continue to generate a tremendous amount of data. Srdan said, “We are moving to a hybrid cloud with emphasis on a big data center in the middle and smaller ones on the sides.”

One final comment was enterprises not wanting to handcuff themselves to the public cloud. There are many reasons to keep data local in fact, security, the ability to know if government data requests have been made and privacy.

In short, Schneider Electric sees the data center of the future morphing to a more prepackaged offering with modules being added as needed. Moreover they see the need to ensure enough compute power is near the devices which will generate the bulk of the data. In other words the IoT will be responsible for a rethink of how corporations design and build out their macro and micro data centers.

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HP's March into Simplifying NFVtag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529352015-05-22T20:51:40Z2015-05-22T21:19:06ZRich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
Arbitrage is one of the great opportunities which presents itself repeatedly in tech. In the nineties, something called international callback allowed am international caller to dial a number in the US and hang up – only to have a US-based call at a lower per-minute rate initiated on their behalf. Many hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on this market for hardware, software and service thanks to the arbitrage opportunity to save money on calling minutes.

VoIP continued this trend with even greater arbitrage and carriers spent billions on equipment to save money carrying phone calls on networks. Sonus, Acme Packet (now Oracle) and many other companies saw billions of dollars of aggregate sales as a result of this new arbitrage opportunity. Then there were the traditional TEMs like Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia (now the same company), Cisco and Ericsson who participated in this shift.

The next opportunity in the market is the move to NFV or a software telco – carriers don’t want to have to deal with the proprietary boxes in their networks. Open, virtualized systems allow cost savings on management and electricity as well as on real estate.

The move to NFV is tailor made for a company like HP as they are a major telecom supplier to data centers already and they are not strangers to the carrier market. The company is looking to become a solid anchor in the move to COTS servers. In fact, they hope to simplify the transition.

Sarwar Raza, Vice President, Product Management recently briefed me on their HP NFV system designed to accelerate the move to network functions virtualization by ensuring carrier grade reliability, scalability and performance. Speaking of which – this week I was at GENBAND Perspectives 15 where there was an NFV panel consisting of Sharon Rosov of ConteXtream, Werner Schaefer of HP, Renu Navale of Intel and Charlie Ashton of Wind River. One comment Charlie made was they now deliver six nines reliability – an amazing number to say the least – under a minute per year.

The HP NFV System is pre-integrated with HP Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade and is designed to ensure end-to-end systems design, validation and support to ensure continuous availability of critical network functions.

The company has a complete set of components to get you started consisting of:

HP NFV Starter Kit – An all-in-one kit comprised of compute nodes with carrier grade performance, control nodes in high availability configuration running virtual infrastructure management (VIM) software – HP Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade, as well as physical infrastructure management (PIM) software and storage nodes. HP Basically the goal is to be a complete turnkey solution designed to help you quickly and effectively deploy NFV clouds.

HP NFV Storage Kit – A pre-configured solution that can be integrated with HP NFV Starter Kit to provide additional capacity for storage intensive applications like content delivery networks (CDN). This solution simplifies integration with existing HP NFV System environments, reducing time to roll-out new services with the goal of minimizing service provider OPEX.

“Many telcos and suppliers have done NFV proof-of-concepts and are now ready to move to production. To do that, they need solutions that are open, carrier grade, and easy to deploy,” said Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager, Network Functions Virtualization and Global Lead Telecommunications, HP. “HP NFV System provides an integrated, pre-tested, deployment-ready NFV hardware and software platform to get customers up-and-running quickly and confidently.”

HP NFV Director 3.0 provides enhanced management and orchestration (MANO) capabilities that streamline bridging of NFV and telecommunications resources, as well as enable faster VNF on-boarding. It combines operations support systems (OSS) and IT management capabilities in a multi-vendor NFV orchestration solution that automate service and infrastructure management to enhance the flexibility and scalability of CSP's current OSS systems.

New HP NFV analytics capabilities in HP NFV Director 3.0 are powered by HP Vertica, providing CSPs the ability to make decisions in real time using NFV data to improve uptime, traffic steering, resource, application and network usage. Predictive analytics gives CSPs critical insights on trending as well as historical capacity usage and threshold crossing warnings or alarms.

HP NFV Director 3.0 with optional HP NFV Analytics is available fully integrated with NFV System and HP OpenStack Carrier Grade or separately.

According to Sarwar “The service provider has access to all the data which was once unstructured allowing them to take actionable intelligence from intelligent traffic steering to hitting capacity.”

The final piece of the puzzle is consulting services which the company hopes you will consider. HP is also leveraging Accenture to help in this area. Jeff Kibodeaux explained this to me at the Perspectives event. He is the Manager of the HP OpenNFV Program and also explained his new company – a split of HP, includes cloud and as a part of this spin-out they will be investing a billion dollars in these areas.

Jeff said this about what carriers are telling him, “We have head from them, they love to have choices.” He concluded, “It is exciting for them and scary at the same time.” He went on to say they are excited to be more agile and to be able to compete in a more cost-effective way.

He also discussed how GEBAND will be able to leverage HP hardware acceleration cards instead of using their current ARM DSP line-cards allowing them to move to COTS and a software-driven model.

From there, he described the demo they did at the show of spinning up SBCs and load balancing as calls start to increase in a network. As calls decrease, there is also a corresponding destruction of VMs as the capacity is not needed.

He continued, “With software, it’s more flexible and less expensive.” He adding, “Genband is betting on the software side of things. They are more innovative than some of our other partners with that approach.”

He then said, “David Walsh (GENBAND CEO) as well as anyone else grasps this future so I think they’re going to be on the forefront of leading these transformations with the carriers. We approach customers together and prove the apps will run and save a lot of time testing with the customer.” He concluded, “We test in five labs worldwide for partner integration testing.

He also mentioned an interesting conundrum for our industry. Many of the people working in telcos are experts in their silo of proprietary hardware, we are now asking them to have an entire skillset in software. “We need to take a network engineer and make them an IT engineer.” He said.

This of course gets us back to professional services – yet another major arbitrage opportunity for those supplying the telecom industry as we go from fixed-function hardware to open and flexible, virtualized software and clouds.

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Independence IT, The Multivendor Desktop-as-a-Service Companytag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529332015-05-22T18:44:46Z2015-05-22T19:00:32ZRich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
The cloud is the answer – what was the question? That seems to be a common tech theme these days and for good reason. The ability for clouds to reduce complexity and time-to-market for companies is unrivaled by even the most competent It departments.

However, in order to be able to properly leverage the heterogeneous cloud, we need numerous layers of abstraction for various applications and service so as to leverage the right servers in the right locations at the right time. Some of the reasons could have to do with cost, government regulations, compliance or just to be able to run the business more flexibly.

Recently I had a chance to learn about Independence IT, competing in the Desktop-as-a-Service/Virtual Application/Workspace-as-a-Service areas against vendors such as Citrix and VMware. Scott Markley Senior Vice President explained their service enablement platform allows companies to run remote applications and workspace as a service across public or private clouds.

Benefits include a single plane-of-glass for deployment and control, a containerized workspace-as-a-service and as mentioned in the title, a multivendor cloud strategy – leveraging VLAN and SDN. The multivendor angle is smart because like a CDN, companies can choose to keep the PoP as close to users as possible for performance reasons and Independence IT makes managing this across a large organization far easier.

The control plane is API-driven meaning they can extend their platform into existing systems – tying in billing and administering all their services in one place. This allows seamless service to the end user from an MSP or VAR who will typically charge $75-100/user per month including help desk, monitoring, Exchange, data and apps.

The next area of growth for the company is identity management which makes sense because once again it’s about abstraction… If you have services strewn throughout private and public clouds, it is best to have a central lock-and-key allowing users access to the right information at the right time. A logical move for Independence IT in a world looking to simplify the move to a multi-cloud world.

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Tech to Eliminate Fast Food Minimum Wage Workerstag:blog.tmcnet.com,2015:/blog/rich-tehrani//13.529292015-05-21T14:55:36Z2015-05-21T18:23:21ZThe Momentum Machines burger robot robot explainedAs cities around the country are passing laws to ensure minimum wages are increased to a "living wage," the tech industry is doing what it does best... Automating like crazy. We can soon expect...Rich Tehranihttp://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/
The Momentum Machines burger robot robot explainedAs cities around the country are passing laws to ensure minimum wages are increased to a "living wage," the tech industry is doing what it does best... Automating like crazy. We can soon expect drive-through fast food locations to have touch screens - or even apps on smartphones - which of course most support today. This will be coupled with automated machines on the back-end which produce the food such as hamburgers, etc.

The point is of course, as minimum wages increase, the high cost of the robots become more reasonable. Lets do some math. If the minimum wage is increased $2.50/hour and there are 20 workers in a restaurant working 40 hours per week or 2,000 hours per year, the additional money the fast food restaurant can save on a robotics purchase is 20*2000*$2.50 or $100,000 per year.

Lets be clear - that is just the additional cost of minimum wage. The total salaries would be $400,000 per year and add to that unemployment insurance, disability, payroll taxes, uniforms, HR, etc. and that could be an additional 25% or another $100,000.

Then there is the reduced cost of real estate commensurate with less workers - perhaps another savings of half a million to a million dollars over the life of a building?

This of course doesn't even factor in cost increases as a result of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.

Bottom line? This is great news for Silicon Valley - thanks to politicians, there will be a huge increase in the number of robots and other automation sold to replace minimum wage workers. Wondering who gets the credit? President Obama seems to have started the national debate - here is his Raise the Wage website, Andrew Cuomo in NYC, the Los Angeles City Council looking for a $15/hour rate and many more.

I am sure you are thinking - boy this guy is great at pointing out problems, what about offering a solution?

Here is one. Companies pay payroll taxes when they hire workers in the US. If we want more minimum wage workers, we should eliminate all taxes and fees on the bottom rung of the employment ladder. Moreover, when we realize millions of entry-level jobs have been lost to countries which don't charge such taxes, we can understand how charging employers to employ people is counterproductive in a globally connected economy.